The Art of Stealing Time

past them to the tree that had been felled and dragged over to make a bridge across the stream.

One large hand shot out and grabbed my arm, right where Helene had left bruises. I yelped. “Watch it! My arm was sore to begin with.”

“We’ve got you now,” the arm-holding man said. Wearily, I gave him the once-over. He was big—not muscles-upon-muscles-big like Hamo, but what I thought of as club-bouncer big—with tattoos of snakes that circled his neck, and dragons that emerged from under both sleeves of his shirt to run down the length of his arms.

“Unhand me, knave,” I said in my best Renaissance Faire manner.

“What did she call me?” Arm-boy asked the second man.

He was just as big and bulky as the first guy, and like him, had copious amounts of ink, but his tattoos consisted mainly of nude women in various poses. “A navel. The daft-witted hen called you a navel.”

“Like an orange?” The first man squinted at me. “Did you call me an orange, missus? Why did you call me an orange?”

“I didn’t. I called you a knave.”

He shook his head in dismay. “Now I gots to rough you up a bit. I don’t want to, but I gots to.”

“Aye, you gots to,” the second man agreed. “Can’t have people calling you an orange when you’re not an orange.”

I suddenly wished I had my sword again. “Look, I said ‘knave,’ not ‘navel orange,’ and even if I had said ‘orange’—”

“You can’t rough her up too much, though, Irv,” the second man added after some thought. “Boss won’t like it.”

Irv, who was looking sadly at me, chewed that over for a minute.

“Help!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, deciding that in this case, it was better to seek aid before the situation got out of hand. “Help! I’m being roughed up by two be-tatted hulks who don’t understand medieval- speak!”

“Aye, boss won’t.”

“Help!” I yelled louder and tried to wrestle my wrist away from Irv.

No one in camp so much as looked my way. I wondered where Gregory was, and why he wasn’t where I needed him to be: namely, conveniently located adjacent to the stream. Damn the man for going off and doing his job.

“Better you don’t rough her up at all,” the second man said, having evidently completed some great undertaking of thought processes.

“Aye,” Irv said slowly, then nodded his head. “That way, boss can rough her up.”

“No one is roughing me up!” I bellowed, and making a fist, punched Irv in the nose as hard as I could.

He caught my fist about a quarter of an inch away from his face. “Here, now!” he said, clearly offended. “There’s no call for that! Frankie, did you see? Daft hen tried to smack me in the gob.”

“Aye. Feisty wench, she is. Best we take her to the boss afore she hurts herself. Boss won’t like that any more than he’d like you to rough her up.”

“Helleeeeeeeeeerp!” My last cry for help morphed into a startled scream when Irv bent down and hefted me onto his shoulder. “Put me down, you great lummox!”

“What’s a lummox?” I heard him ask his friend as they crossed over the tree to Ethan’s side of the stream.

“Don’t know. Might be another fruit.”

“Daft hen.”

“Aye, daft hen.”

“I’m not a hen, and I’m not daft. Oh, for the love of the stars and moons, would you put me down?”

“Imagine someone calling you an orange,” Frankie said conversationally as the two men strode along.

“I didn’t—wait a minute. Why aren’t you taking me to Ethan?”

I had fully expected that the two bully boys would go straight into Ethan’s camp and deliver me to their boss, but they didn’t. They made a sharp right at the camp and headed for the woods that ran along the far side of the encampment.

“Who?” Irv asked.

“Ethan! The man who owns . . . runs . . . the camp just there.”

“Oh, him.” Irv made a gesture with his shoulder that had me sliding down his back a few inches. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

“Daft hen doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Frankie offered.

“I’m going to be sick all over you if you don’t set me down!” I warned them.

That did the trick. Irv stopped and set me onto my feet, retaining a hold on my wrist as he did so. “Don’t be thinking you are going to get away,” he warned. “Boss said we wasn’t to let you get away.”

“Aye, he said that.” Frankie nodded and took my other arm in his beefy hand.

“Who, exactly, is this boss?” I twisted around to look over my shoulder at Ethan’s camp, stumbling when the men started forward. I had half hoped to see Gregory lurking about the edges, in the process of thieving, but although I could see people moving around in the camp, we were too far away for me to yell for assistance.

“Boss is boss,” Irv answered in a bewildered tone, as if he couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured that out.

“Yes, but what is his name?”

“Oh. Tessersnatch. Baldwin Tessersnatch.”

I froze, and was promptly jerked off my feet when the two men kept walking. They paused to help right me. “Tessersnatch?” I cleared my throat when my voice came out a squeak. “The lawyer?”

“Aye, that’s him.” Frankie gave me a pitying look. “You’ve gone and made him angry, you have. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

“No good being in your shoes,” Irv agreed, marching forward again.

My brain whirled those two words around and around. Baldwin Tessersnatch was a mortal lawyer who had ties to the Otherworld, most recently with my two moms. Desperate for funds for their school, they—foolishly, and quite illegally—had agreed to sell, through Baldwin, some incantations to another mortal man.

The dread that filled me at the name turned swiftly to hot, consuming anger. “Well, now. How about that. Baldwin Tessersnatch, the man who threw me off a cliff to my death when I told him my moms wouldn’t be fulfilling the transaction. You know, I think I’d like to see him. I have a thing or two to say to Mr. Murderous Tessersnatch.”

“Baldwin,” Irv corrected me.

“Daft hen was making a funny,” Frankie said. “At least I think she was. You never know with one what calls you an orange.”

I shook off their respective holds on my wrists and marched forward, saying in a voice that should have dropped the birds from the trees, “Oh, I have several things to discuss with Baldwin Tessersnatch!”

“It’s a good thing that we got to her before that other hen,” Irv told Frankie.

“I wonder if I can remember the spell for shriveling up a man’s testicles,” I mused as we entered the woods. “I know it started off Misbegotten wart on the backside of humankind, but I can’t remember if the second line is Go and boil your bollocks in a vat of rime, or barrel of lime. Hmm.”

“Aye, she gave me the willies, she did.”

“Maybe it’s Shrivel the stones till the end of all time? Damn my crappy memory for spells. Wait—what other hen?” I stopped again, turning to look back at them. “A woman is looking for me? Is her name Holly?”

“Don’t know her name. She never said, did she, Frankie?”

“I’m of a mind that she didn’t, Irv.”

“All she said was that her boss wanted to see you, and that she would see to it that we were paid twice what the boss pays us if we’d help her find you.” Irv looked thoughtful again. “We were tempted, weren’t we, Frankie?”

“We were,” his buddy admitted. “But only until she told us who her boss was, and then we figured we’d be